I’m indebted to a colleague who many years ago succinctly told me: Backups don’t matter, only restores matter. It’s a deceptively simple observation: if your goal is durability, what you truly care about is your ability to restore from a backup. The existence of the backup itself is meaningless – backups are not magic totems of durability. Teams that are serious about durability don’t just take backups; they actually verify that they can restore from them.
